Alternative Religion/ Library

THE “FALSE DECRETALS” FORGERIES

 A “record of forgery in the interest of the Church which resembles nothing else in history,” in the words of Dr. McCabe, has so far been presented; the climax and capstone is now to be seen in what Voltaire terms “the boldest and most magnificent forgery which has deceived the world for centuries,” the so-called “False Decretals of Isidore.” While it is true, as said by Reinach, that “never yet has the papacy acknowledged that for 1000 years it made use of forged documents for its own benefit,” yet we have seen a thousand confessions of the fact of forgery, and either the admission or the inevitable inference, that they were used by the Church in the fraudulent obtention of viciously illicit ends. The following brief paragraph of further confession from CE., is pregnant with suggestion of the moral depravity of popes and priests, the whole Church, the sodden ignorance of the votaries of Holy Church, cleric and lay, the darkness of the life of mind and spirit till at the “Renaissance” men were reborn indeed, and after slow and painful growth of learning and of freeing from fear, began to expose the Church in its forgeries, ²¹¹ frauds, and vices. The tone of CE. is quite apologetical for this particular monument of Church fraud; it seeks palliation in the conditions of ignorance of the Middle Ages; but it forgets that Holy Church purposely produced this ignorance, and that Popes and Church are illumined by the Holy Ghost of their God against all ignorance and error so that its “Church never has erred and never shall”: but maybe this statement is itself an error. CE. now speaks for this gigantic fraud of Holy Church, the False Isidorian Decretals:

“Isidorian Decretals is the name given to certain apocryphal letters contained in a collection of canon laws composed about the middle of the ninth century. ... Nowadays every one agrees that these so-called papal letters are forgeries. These documents, about 100 in number, appeared suddenly in the ninth century and are nowhere mentioned before that time. ... The pseudo-Isidore makes use of documents written long after the times of the popes to whom he attributed them. The popes of the first three centuries are made to quote documents that did not appear until the fourth or fifth century, etc. Then again there are endless anachronisms. The Middle Ages were deceived by this huge forgery, but during the Renaissance men of learning and the canonists generally began to recognize the fraud. ... Nevertheless the official edition of the ‘Corpus Juris,' in 1580, upheld the genuineness of the false decretals.” (CE. vi, 773.) But the God-guided Vicars of God knew they were forgeries.

“Upon these spurious decretals,” says Hallam, “was built the great fabric of papal supremacy over the different national churches; a fabric which has stood after its foundations crumbled beneath it; for no one has pretended to deny, for the last two centuries, that the imposture is too palpable for any but the most ignorant ages to credit.” (History of the Middle Ages, Bk. VII, ch. ii, 99.) Though on their face affecting only matters spiritual and causes ecclesiastical, they soon had all Europe strangled as in the tentacles of a giant octopus, by a process thus described by Lord Bryce: “By the invention and adoption of the False Decretals it (the Church) had provided itself with a legal system suited to any emergency, and which gave it unlimited authority through the Christian world in causes spiritual and over persons ecclesiastical. Canonical ingenuity found it easy in one way or another to make this include all causes and persons whatsoever; for crime is always and wrong is often sin, nor can aught be done anywhere which may not affect the clergy.” (Holy Roman Empire, ch. x, 152.) “The Forgery,” says Dr. Draper, “produced an immense extension of papal power, it displaced the old Church government, divesting it of the republican attributes it had possessed, and transforming it into an absolute monarchy. It brought the bishops into subjection to Rome, and made the pontiff the supreme judge of the whole Christian world. It prepared the way for the great attempt, subsequently made by Hildebrand, to convert the states of Europe into a theocratic priest-kingdom, with the pope at its head.”

(Conflict between Religion and Science, ch. x, 271.) ²¹²

“These frauds, which, pretending to be a series of ‘papal edicts' from Clement and his successors during the ante-Niccne ages, are, in fact, the manufactured product of the ninth century,—the most stupendous imposture of the world's history, the most successful and the most stubborn in its hold upon enlightened nations. Like the mason's framework of lath and scantlings, on which he turns an arch of massive stone, the Decretals served their purpose, enabling Nicholas I to found the Papacy by their insignificant aid. That swelling arch of vanity once reared, the framework might be knocked out; but the fabric stood, and has borne up every weight imposed upon it for ages. Its strong abutments have been ignorance and despotism. Nicholas produced his flimsy framework of imposture, and amazed the whole Church by the audacity of the claims he founded upon it. The age, however, was unlearned and uncritical; and, in spite of remonstrances from France under lead of Hincmar, bishop of Rheims, the West patiently submitted to the overthrow of the ancient Canons and the Nicene Constitutions, and bowed to the yoke of a new canon law, of which these frauds were not only made an integral, but the essential, part. The East never accepted them for a moment. ... The Papacy created the Western schism, and contrived to call it ‘the schism of the Greeks.' The Decretals had created the Papacy, and they enabled the first Pope to assume that communion with himself was the test of Catholic communion: hence his excommunication of the Easterns, which, after brief intervals of relaxation, settled into the chronic schism of the Papacy, and produced the awful history of the medieval Church in Western Europe.” (ANF. viii, 601.)

THE FORGED DECRETUM OF GRATIAN

 Great and pernicious as were the influences of the forged Isidorian Decretals, there yet remained a step to bring the Forger Church to the height of its age-old ambitious scheme to completely imitate the olden Roman Empire and dominate the world. “The School of Bologna had just revived the study of Roman law; Gratian sought to inaugurate a similar study of canon law. But while compilations of texts and official collections were available for Roman law, or ‘Corpus juris civilis,' Gratian had no such assistance. He therefore adopted the plan of inserting the texts in the body of his general treatise; from the disordered mass of canons, collected from the earliest days, he selected the law actually in force. ... The science of canon law was at length established.” (CE. ix, 57.) But this disordered mass out of which Gratian selected was very largely the old ²¹³ forged reliances of the Church; thus in making his selections “Gratian alleges forged decretals” (CE. iv,),—including the Constantine Donation, the Isidore forgeries, etc. Yet, withal, “the ‘Decretum' of Gratian was considered in the middle of the twelfth century as a corpus juris canonici, i.e. a code of ecclesiastic laws then in force.” (CE. iv, 671.) It clinched the rivets in the forged fetters of the Church upon the neck of Christendom, and sanctioned the principles which in the next century were invoked to found and justify the Holy Inquisition. Of this celebrated document, the beginning of the “science” of Church legistic sophistry, Draper says: “The most potent instrument of the new papal system was Gratian's Decretum, which was issued about the middle of the Twelfth Century. It was a mass of fabrications. It made the whole Christian world, through the papacy, the domain of the Italian clergy. It inculcated that it is lawful to constrain men to goodness, to torture and execute heretics, and to confiscate their property; that to kill an excommunicated person is not murder; that the pope, in his unlimited superiority to all law, stands on an equality with the Son of God.” (Conflict between Science and Religion, ch. x, p. 273.) 

THE FULL FRUITION OF FORGERY

 As said by Dr. McCabe: “There was no need of further forgeries. Now securely established on its basis of forged donations of temporal power and territory, forged decretals stating its spiritual powers, and forged lives of saints and martyrs, the papacy was so strong and prosperous that the popes actually dreamed of forming a sort of United States of Europe with themselves as virtual presidents. Nearly every country was in some ingenious way made out to be a fief of the Papacy and bound to recognize the Pope as its feudal monarch.” (LBB. 1130, 44-5.)

 Founding thus its religion, that newer form of Paganism called Christianity, on falsehood and forged “Scripture” documents; its pretensions to superiority and “primacy” on gross “interpolations” into the forged Scriptures; its spurious claims to territorial possessions and temporal sovereignty upon forged title-deeds and Donations; its “spiritual” and legal domination upon forged Church law and constitutions,—thus was the visible Church of Christ brought to the perfection of its power and degradation. For fifteen hundred years every document under which it claimed, it forged; it forged until it had no longer need of forgery, for nothing was left to forge; forged so long as it could forge with impunity, for with the Renaissance its old forgeries began to be discovered and exposed, and it could commit undetected no further documentary forgeries.

Such is the objective side, as it were, of the Christian religion and its Church. Its subjective side, the subjugation of its victims by imposed ignorance and superstition, through limitless forgeries of miracles, martyrs, saints and relics, remains to be briefly noticed as a sort of by-product of the Holy Church Forgery Mill. ²¹⁴ 

THE FRUSTRATED EMS REVOLT

Not to mention the revolt known as the “Reformation,” the discovery of the unholy and criminal practices of the Church in the matter of its claims of primacy and jurisdiction, as defined in the Isidorian False Decretals, led to one tardy and half-way ecclesiastical effort of revolt within the Roman Church, which might have developed into something worth while to humanity as a whole, but that “political considerations” intervened to bring it to naught. It is cited simply by way of historical reminder, and as suggestive of what may yet be effectively accomplished to the full extent of popular repudiation.

The Congress of Ems, in 1786, was a gathering of the representatives of a number of German Archbishops and other clergy, “for the purpose of protesting against papal interference in the exercise of episcopal powers and fixing the future relations between these archbishops and the Roman pontiff. ... On 25 August, 1786, these archiepiscopal representatives signed the notorious ‘Punctation of Ems', consisting of twenty-three articles, which aimed at making the German archbishops practically independent of Rome. Assuming that Christ gave unlimited power of binding and loosing to the Apostles and their successors, the bishops, the ‘Punctation' maintains that all prerogatives and reservations which were not actually connected with the primacy during the first three centuries owe their origin, to the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals, universally acknowledged as false, and, hence, that the bishops must look upon all interference of the Roman Curia with the exercise of their episcopal functions in their own dioceses as encroachments on their rights. ... It may easily be seen that the articles of the ‘Punctation' lower the papal primacy to a merely honorary one and advocate an independence of the arch-bishops in regard to the pope which is entirely incompatible with the Unity and Catholicity of the Church of Christ,”—such are the unctuous objections made by Christ's Church. However, the Punctations were “ratified by the Archbishops, and sent to Emperor Joseph ii for his support. The Emperor was pleased with the articles, and would have pledged his unqualified support if his councillors had not for political reasons advised him otherwise.” (CE. v, 409-10.) Rejecting the “assumption,” now known to be false and forged, that Christ had anything at all to do with Peter and the Rock-and-Keys forgery, all may now feel free to discard these primitive “Scripture” frauds just as all the others of the Church which have been exposed as false and abandoned. 

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